In the semiconductor industry, devices are fabricated by a number of manufacturing processes producing structures of an ever-decreasing size. Some manufacturing processes such as plasma etch and plasma clean processes expose a substrate to a high-speed stream of plasma to etch or clean the substrate. The plasma may be highly corrosive, and may corrode processing chambers and other surfaces that are exposed to the plasma.
Currently process kit rings have performance issues because of high erosion rate and plasma chemistry interaction. Typically an insert ring and single ring are made out of quartz for conductor etch and Si for dielectric etch. These rings sit around the wafer to make the plasma density uniform for uniform etching. However, quartz and Si have very high erosion rates under various etch chemistries and bias powers. Severe erosion of the rings can result in on wafer based particle defects, process shift, deposition of erosion bi-product on other chamber components and reduction in chamber yield.